


Your death is a number but I cannot count that high

by dimtraces



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Fix-It, Force Bond, Gen, Magic, Mechu-Deru, Zombies, but a happier version, post-Son of Dathomir, yes this is gonna be Zombie Savage again sue me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-01-05 19:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12196152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: In a desperate last-ditch attempt to save his brother when he lay dying in Sundari palace, Maul used his fledgling grasp of Dathomiri magic and every other animating skill he’d ever heard of to trap the life inside Savage’s body. He didn’t find out that he in fact succeeded: after Maul’s abduction by Lord Sidious and his subsequent rescue by the loyal Death Watch, the body was simply gone.Now, Maul has nothing left but survival. That, and strange dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ETA 2018-05-12: Originally this was tagged as "Author chose not to warn", because I wasn't sure about whether to tag "Major Character Death" considering the character in question is magically kept alive. Since I then updated the summary to mention that Savage's reanimated, and because he's an active character throughout and the situation is very different from what I think MCD is, I've changed the warnings to better reflect the content. There is no death, only undeath. And violence.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which pain has no meaning.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Some body horror, specifically things wriggling under your skin. Mentions of character death (Talzin, and Savage's presumed dead for now), suicide, suicide watch, child abuse, dismemberment.

“Lord Maul?”

He does not flinch, although he didn’t hear anyone walk up to him— _the apprentice would never have failed to notice, but there is so little of him left now_ —and he can’t see his watcher Gar Saxon from where he is kneeling, in the very center of the cabin that has been his home for days now, and with his back to the door. Something squirms and writhes inside his chest. He keeps his eyes closed, and he doesn’t flinch, because he’s better than that, still, even though his Master’s lessons are long past now, dulled and buried deep below Dathomir’s smouldering carnage and those precious months playing at being crime lords with his brother and the dim years spent fighting for survival on the scrap-heaps where his Master abandoned Maul.

He does not flinch: the child who would have seized up in fear never existed.

It was never _allowed_ to exist.

Besides, even if he was the kind of person who would enslave himself to the instinctive responses of his body—there is no reason for it anymore. The last person who might have mourned that fearful boy is gone now. _Everything that can be taken, has been._ Legs. Purpose. Grace. Duty. Brother. Title. Birth planet. Mother, now, too, and isn’t that why Kast and Saxon have taken it upon themselves to watch him at all times.

He doesn’t leave the cabin on the Mandalorian barge where they put him, some uncounted days ago, and one of them is always with him. He meditates. Occasionally, someone brings inside food and they pass it on: currently, Saxon is setting down a bowl on the floor, and Maul can smell the soup. He never eats it, and they just take it away again. At first, they often touched his wrists, too, checking for pulse, and he didn’t fight them off. There was no use for vanity, or the energy for it, even though their doubt was offensive.

 _Of course he will survive_.

Maul has lived through worse pain. He just can’t remember it right now.

_(“Some soldiers eat their blasters,” Kast explained on the first day, as she methodically searched the cabin for sharp implements and confiscated his weapons. “We know how to deal with this, and don’t try anything because we will be watching.” Per her orders, the unused bed was covered with the finest tooka fluff, the hairs apparently much too delicate and short to thread into a rope that could support an adult zabrak’s weight. A half-zabrak, after Naboo. She looked with worry at his prosthetic legs and the jagged parts that could be pried off, but she let them be._

_Maul didn’t have the heart to inform Kast that he wouldn’t need any tools to kill himself. He didn’t bother to inform her that he’d clung on to life through worse. If he had nothing else, he still had this: he did not want to die.)_

_Suicide watch_ , he thinks with wry anger. Not entirely unexpected: he was barely responsive when they fled Dathomir, his mind screaming with the face of his mother’s corpse and the swirls of the living force that had invaded him—the swirls that are in him even now—the connections he had forged when he threw open his mind in a desperate call for help, to anyone who might hear him.

No help came.

Grievous’ blades didn’t stop.

Green light rippled and gushed out of his mother, out of the woman that Maul had barely known, and it left nothing but bones and pain and his Master’s smile. Green light. It had trickled out and lingered on Savage, too, while Maul had held onto his brother’s hand and wished he could hold the life inside. He’d tried, had grabbed hold of the green magic with his mind and forced it back inside, and he’d begged the big soft fingers not to leave him. Magic was an unknown thing. It hadn’t worked.

No-one had come then, either, and he doesn’t even know what happened to his brother’s corpse. He should probably work up enough energy to ask his keepers.

 _You can scream but no-one will ever come,_ Maul’s mind helpfully tells him with the mocking pale grin that still lives inside. _Little Maul, still begging for his mother’s help. For his brother. You’re weak._ This _is how you killed them._ Neither Savage nor Talzin had had enough skill to survive Lord Sidious, their death a certainty the moment they decided to protect Maul.

Maul’s death should have been a certainty, the moment Lord Sidious decided to discard him, and yet—here he is, alone with his loss.

 _Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion I gain strength._ Maul doesn’t flatter the dead by pretending it was their protection that saved him; he doesn’t flatter himself by pretending that it is because of his own strength. Master would have killed Maul if he’d wished to, regardless of the bodies between them or the depths Maul plunged into the force. _Through strength I gain power. Through power I gain victory._ Maul is powerless before Sidious. He lives by his former Master’s indifference, by the grandiosity of the plan that Sidious is pursuing and his own cosmic insignificance. It grates. _Through victory my chains are broken. The force shall free me._

Maul will never be a Sith Master. He’s too weak. He was nothing at all when he stood in front of Lord Sidious, and that ancient, destined power will never be his.

Every second of Maul’s existence has been lived in service of being Sith, of becoming a Master; every lonely day, every lightning strike, every assassin droid towering over his malnourished preteen body and methodically kicking it until every rib broke while Master sighed with disappointment that Maul hadn’t yet managed to extricate himself. Every pain in Maul’s life strengthened his connection to the dark side. Maul is Sith; the pain is _meaningful_.

The death of his brother and his mother should mean something. It’s pain. It should make him stronger, and he should welcome it, but he can’t. He doesn’t feel stronger, now that Talzin is gone. Now that _Savage_ is dead. _What use is suffering if he cannot wield it; what use is being a Sith if he cannot turn suffering into power?_

Maul will never be a Sith Master, and his pain has no meaning anymore. It’s _never_ meant anything, because he’s always been weak. _It has always been just pain._ Lord Sidious was right to discard his powerless apprentice, and the only thing left of his former life now is bare survival. Survival, and grim determination. He will live, for nothing but spite if he has to, even if his Master does not care. When he breathes in again, he tries not to feel the dull ache in his chest. It’s not empty, there’s something wriggling in there, like a brood of maggots or a clutter of remote-controlled bombs.

There’s nothing in there. He’s checked.

_(He wouldn’t have put it beyond Sidious or his new ex-Jedi pet to fit him with a slave transmitter or something similar, after they killed Savage and took him from Mandalore and locked him inside their secret prison, and so he forced the Mandalorians to put him inside a scanning tube after the rescue. Nothing. No metal in his chest or anywhere apart from the legs. No foreign biological matter, or anything else indicating a tracking device. No electrostatic charges.)_

The pests inside him are alive, but not quite. Animated, perhaps. Angular. His mother’s magic, that’s what the squirming reminds him of. The sensation is similar to what he felt when Savage took him from Lotho Minor and she patched the hole in his torso with new legs, and the metal wriggled with her green magic. Metal animated by her power, as substitute for flesh. It can’t be Talzin’s magic, though: she’s gone now. Dead. This isn’t— _can’t be_ —her doing, although it hurts so much like the magic that has given him feet, and like the magic that he’d held in his desperate hands when it poured out of his dying brother.

Whatever they are, the writhing things are jolted again, harshly, as if they had been hit—as if there _was_ something to be hit inside Maul, something that doesn’t belong—and then they slink back into place. Maul taps his chest.

The worms inside him don’t move. They are not physical. His flesh doesn’t stretch over them.

“Lord Maul, are you alright?” Saxon asks. Surely, he must have better things to do than keep suicide watch over Maul, but getting any of the Mandalorians to leave him alone is beyond Maul’s skill-set. They are stubborn as mules. They’re almost as bad as Savage was back then, shortly after Lotho Minor, always watching with his quiet sad eyes and badgering him to eat horrible, homemade food.

 _It’s just psychosomatic,_ Maul decides. He taps the spots on his chest again. Two, above each of his hearts, in the same places where his Master stabbed Savage.

He touches his skin, and somewhere far away, massive gentle fingers wrap around his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this instead of doing anything remotely useful, like working on any of my other WIPs or doing stuff for uni. I'll definitely continue this at some point, because it's useful to dive into the minds of people who just will not die when the sun stops shining and the depression gets stronger. For now, just hints of what's happening, because Maul has no clue  
> Title's from Malcolm Middleton's Death Love Depression Love Death. I've always wanted to write a fic with this title, and I'm excited to waste it on this incredibly self-indulgent story about bodies being creepy and brothers reuniting and why survival at all costs is kinda good
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Maul has a weird dream, and also some soup.
> 
>  **Warnings:** strange magic stuff and light body horror. Also mourning, still.

“I am an unworthy apprentice,” Savage grinds out. He’s nothing but wet gasps and sounds and blood on the dirty floor. “I’m not—”

Maul forces his brother’s mouth shut then, violently enough to make teeth crack. His right hand wraps itself around Savage’s face, around the lower half, and Maul pushes the jaw closed with enough desperation that he almost overbalances, almost tumbles down onto his brother instead of kneeling by the fallen body and bending over it. Barely in time, he manages to brace himself against the floor with the free hand. His fingernails dig into the soft skin of Savage’s cheeks with enough pressure that they scrape the skin off, warm trickles of blood, and Maul’s thumb slips into the fleshy spot between jawbone and neck. Deep bruises, tomorrow, if there _is_ a tomorrow for them. The whimpers are muffled. The apology is silenced.

He will not have his apprentice _(his brother, his_ dying _brother)_ waste his last few breaths on frivolous words. Instead, he traps air and the green icy twisting magic—traps _life_ —inside.

 _(It’s true, Maul_ had _resented his bumbling apprentice. It always seemed unfair that Maul had tried so hard and suffered so much punishment and failed, and yet Savage knew nothing and he wasn’t hurt. A wrong impulse: there is no fairness but the Master’s will. Besides, the imbalance could have been corrected, but…)_

None of this matters now, and there are so many words— _I’ll never leave you, brother_ , because this is a wish after all, _I will not leave. I am not dying. This wound is not real_ —so many words that he wants to hear, and won’t. He will not allow Savage to speak.

Desperately, he holds the green light inside Savage’s jaw.

Some of it escapes, drools out like spit: icy green ethereal burning saliva. The magic spills down over Maul’s fingers and elbows, rears up angrily— _it is not his; it does not like to be held_ —and it flows up Maul’s nose and takes away the air until he’s lightheaded, but still, he holds Savage’s mouth shut. Still, he wraps his mind around the threads that have already slipped out. He tugs. He gathers and stuffs them inside every hole he can find, ears and mouth and nostrils and the charred spots where Master impaled Savage on his red blades. He pushes magic and whatever else he can find deep inside twin damaged loving hearts. Into lungs. Into muscle tissue and gristle and arteries.

Maul’s hands are not a barrier: the green light is not physical. He shoves it through his own flesh. It hurts. Something scrapes against Maul’s skin, cutting through his index finger: a piece of shrapnel, detritus from broken stained-glass windows that must have been caught in his concentration. It wriggles inside his hand until it slips below and then disappears. It must have hurt Savage too, he’s writhing in Maul’s grasp and then he spasms and his gentle eyes roll and he almost manages to tear his mouth away. He bites Maul. Whatever it is, it hurts Savage, but the magic _burns_ Maul. It feels like Naboo, like Kenobi’s ‘saber tearing through Maul’s viscera, only higher: the lightsaber is now stabbing Maul’s hearts— _brother, how are you using the Sisters’ magic, what is_ —stabbing Maul exactly where Master skewered Savage, and distantly, he wonders whether Lord Sidious has used the distraction to dispose of Maul the same way he did his brother. Then the question is swallowed again, by a churning sea of pain and concentration and terror.

None of this matters, not the pain and not death. _Savage is pathetic and scared and weak, and if he cannot ensure his own survival then he deserves nothing, but_ —Maul knows that Savage will lose more breath, more magic, if he lets go. He cannot let go. He doesn’t. The light is so cold that it scalds him, it sizzles off his flesh and leaves itchy wriggling trails wherever it touches him— _did Talzin’s magic hurt this much when it restored Maul or does he just not remember_ —the magic writhes and durasteel scraps volley and beat against his back and pound his head and the holes in his chest burn and then—

It stops.

There is no magic. No light. No pain.

There is warm air puffing gently against Maul’s palm. Yellow eyes look up.

Hastily, Maul tears his hand away. Tears his body away. He rears up from where he’s crouched over Savage, up and away, until he’s sitting on the floor, and then he crawls backwards, keeps pushing his unfeeling feet against the floor till he’s put some distance between them, if only a few centimeters.

Savage sits up.

 _He looks—healthy_ , Maul thinks. Strange. Alive. Whole. The skin that stretches over his chest isn’t free from burns or scars, from holes, as if Savage had never been stabbed. The green light isn’t gone, as if he’d never been cursed. Faint magic lurks around him, and there are holes, twin massive gouges burnt into Savage’s chest, filled up with shrapnel. A button lurks in there, like a… Like the ignition button of a lightsaber handle, of Savage’s saberstaff, scavenged and stuffed inside as a quick patch for what should have been a mortal wound. Next to it, a scrap of the emitter guard’s edge sticks out. There’s a torn-off piece of Maul’s own prosthetic foot in there, too, and the whole situation reminds Maul of his own prosthetics, of the new legs that Talzin conjured. Only much worse. Ramshackle. Whatever’s inside Savage wriggles slightly with every breath.

Then, the light sucks itself in and the metal smooths out.

No injury.

No death.

Just a brother, now, and he is smiling.

“Brother, are you alright?” Savage asks, and then he flickers, growing pale and then present again. “Maul? How are you here? I thought you were—”

 _It did not happen this way_ , Maul realizes _. This fight took place_ weeks _ago, and it didn’t happen this way._ Savage isn’t alive, the magic hadn’t worked, and Maul is not on Mandalore. He’s on a barge headed away from Dathomir, now, taking random jumps to evade Master’s scanners, or maybe that’s stopped now. Maul doesn’t know. He knows one thing, though: _This did not happen._

_This is nothing but a dream._

Savage is dead now.

Maul hadn’t managed to keep him alive. Outside of this dream-world and in the real Mandalorian palace, weeks ago, Master’s laughter had echoed quietly in the empty hall, and Maul had let go of Savage’s mouth. Had let the head drop. He’d lost control— _given up control_ —of the green light that he’d been forcing back into his brother’s body, the magic that he’d wished could be his brother’s salvation. He’d ignored the choking, the spasms, the death rattle. He’d let go.

Master had come, and Maul had stood up, choosing survival—choosing _revenge_ —over futility and his brother’s dwindling life force.

He’d let Savage _die_.

It had been the only correct choice. Magic is fickle and primitive, and it was wrong, below any Sith, to seek to prolong a weakling’s life. Letting go had been the right choice, but one that had been irrelevant, in truth, like any choice that Maul has ever made. Spoilt by his impotence. None of them have effected anything, and the decision to leave Savage choking on the ground didn’t either. In mere seconds, Maul had been on the floor, dumb and whining and begging for mercy that would never be his. In minutes, he’d been unconscious, and loaded on the prison transport.

Savage is dead, now, but he’s also patched up and crawling closer through the half-remembered nightmare corridor, and _it did not happen this way._ It wasn’t even a corridor. Savage touches Maul’s shoulder, and then, as always, he draws the hand back after a fraction of a second, afraid of the instinctive violent retaliation that doesn’t come, this time, if only because _this is not real_.

“Are you alright, Lord Maul?” Savage asks. Shakes his head, frowning. Something wriggles in his chest, and it’s not smooth anymore: the emitter guard sticks out again. The gouges on his cheeks have scabbed over, suddenly. “Where did you go? Maul, is that really you? Is this a vision? Tell me where you are, brother. You weren’t on Mandalore. Please—”

“We need to leave, Savage,” Maul says, “This place is dangerous.” He offers his bleeding hand.

Savage looks concerned, briefly, and then he takes it and hauls himself up, and he smiles gently. “You’re shaking. Do not be afraid, brother. It’s good that you knew how to use the Dathomiri magic, isn’t it?” he says. “You kept me alive. Thank you. If you hadn’t known how to use magic, both of my hearts would have failed. I would have died.”

Maul’s grin is empty. “You did.”

 _This is nothing but a foolish dream_ , a nightmare that taunts him and that’s pretending that Lord Sidious is gone, somehow. That He would have given Maul enough time to talk to Savage. It’s pretending that Maul is proficient enough at Dathomiri magic to save his brother, when he’s never learnt the skill. He’s spent his whole life immersed in Sith teachings and yet Maul still failed as a Master, as an apprentice, too. Seeing magic used once could never have been sufficient. Maul never could have used Talzin’s tricks to save his brother. _It had been an insane, helpless attempt, that’s all_. Savage is dead. Also, the dream doesn’t understand his speech patterns, and when it gets them right, his brother makes no sense at all.

“I didn’t, I… Maul, please tell me where you are.”

This is nothing but an empty simulacrum, a torture dreamt up by Maul’s unconscious mind, and the details aren’t even correct. Savage is dead, and Maul doesn’t know where his corpse is.

Still, it takes an embarrassingly long time until Maul manages to make himself wake up.

Finally, he blinks.

The floor is real, now. It’s much cleaner.

Maul blinks again, angry— _why did he want to stay there_ —and he wipes the gunk out of the corners of his eyes. His fingers come away empty. The next thing he notices is the pressure in his back, the muscle cramps and pressure sores where flesh meets durasteel as if he’s been asleep for too many hours, and kneeling in this spot for days.

Maul hasn’t moved at all for a long time. How pathetic.

Then, he smells meat. There is a bowl of bone broth next to Maul’s knee, in the same place where there has always been a bowl or plate, ever since he was brought into this room. Kast or Saxon always bring them. It doesn’t smell appealing or repulsive; it doesn’t smell like he should eat it. Nothing has smelled that way, ever since he was brought aboard. Ever since Dathomir, but— _Maul remembers the choice he made._ The choice to drop Savage’s head. He’d chosen survival over clinging on to his brother, then, and he should honor this choice now. He has nothing left but survival, and part of that is sustenance. He can force himself to believe he is hungry. He should eat.

Maul picks up the bowl. He tips it against his mouth and his stomach aches, hurts more when the first few drops of soup hit it. Greedily, he slurps it all down.

It tastes of nothing.

This is both expected and irrelevant. Maul licks the bowl clean.

“Are you feeling better, Lord Maul?” the watcher asks. Apparently, it’s Kast’s duty for today.

“Yes,” Maul replies. He didn’t hear her approach, and he doesn’t flinch. It is bad enough that she’s seen enough to ask this question, but it’s also immaterial what she has witnessed. Useless vanity. What these people think of Maul does not matter, or—they are loyal to him, apparently, in spite of it. A strange thing. This is the only plan of Maul’s that ever succeeded. He should make use of their loyalty. “Can you procure another soup bowl?”

“Yes, Lord Maul.” She types something on the comm on her wristband.

Maul hands her the bowl, then, and he shakes out his hand. It doesn’t help: there’s still the imprint of another hand holding onto him. The dream hasn't left yet.

_(“Is this a vision? Tell me where you are, brother.”)_

“Do you...” Maul looks up at Kast. “What did you do with Savage’s corpse?”

Different cultures have different funerary rites. They are feebly attached to dead things. They honor their remains, touch and think of those they have lost forever, and they let go. The Jedi like to burn their corpses, pile them high with timber and straw and set them on fire, a sign of their intrinsic weakness. They want the body gone, so that its rot does not show them their own future. Their inevitable fall on the blade of the Sith. Other cultures like to… Maul doesn’t know any other rites. He’d never thought it particularly important what happens to cadavers. He himself was going to be disposed of in the least obtrusive fashion, most likely, when his time came. Dissolved, perhaps, or left for the flies.

“There was no body on Mandalore. Not your brother’s body, anyway. We don’t know what happened to it,” Kast says. “I’m sorry, Lord Maul.”

Maul doesn’t why this feels wrong. It shouldn’t matter—it doesn’t matter, and even the question was superfluous, a leftover urge from his pointless nightmare.

If it had been recovered, his brother’s corpse would have been a relic of warmer times at best, of the future criminal empire they could have had, of the _future_ they could have had. At worst, it would have been an indictment of his own abject weakness. Regardless of its significance to Maul, it would have been dead. Empty. A slowly rotting thing with no spark of Savage’s gentleness left inside.

“You searched the palace?” he asks, anyway.

“Yes,” Kast says. “As soon as we realized you were gone we entered Sundari. We looked in every room, but you weren’t there. We found nothing but stale signs of carnage, and we knew that you had been taken. We sent out spies into the Separatists’ armies and many other locations to find you. It’s—finding you was time-sensitive. We prioritized. It’s possible that we didn’t inspect the palace thoroughly enough to notice his corpse. Do you want me to order another search?”

Savage is dead, and this doesn’t matter.

_(“Brother, where are—”)_

“Do that,” Maul orders. “Find his body. Bring me more food. Where are we going?”

They will find the corpse, and Maul knows nothing of mourning or pointless rituals, but he knows Savage— _knew Savage_ —and his brother valued the nightbrother way of life. Their way of death, too, most likely, and Savage would have wanted to have those rites, whatever they are. He was feeble enough to care about that. Nightbrothers’ rites… everyone that Maul could have asked is dead now. Mother Talzin has been slain, and Dathomir lies in ruin. Everyone is dead now. Everything that was left of Savage is gone. Everything but the body they will find, and soon it will rot, too—or burn, maybe.

Every last part of Maul’s history that wasn’t Sith is _gone_. Master has taken all things, even those that Maul hadn’t known he owned. Only Maul’s life is left, and Master will not take it. With the aid of his loyal soldiers, he has escaped. A hollow triumph— _pretending that Lord Sidious would waste his anger on his former apprentice’s survival is nothing but vainglory and delusion_ —but a triumph nonetheless.

The only victory Maul will ever have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot very, very slowly thickens. This is the first dream I've ever written, I hope it makes sense! Or not-sense, but in the correct way.  
> Thanks for reading <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Savage stares at the almost-flesh hand and counts out the things he knows: his body is changed, and it will not die. Maul is dead.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Attempted suicide, body horror.

At the same time and parsecs away, Savage opens his eyes. He stretches out his heavy, stiff arms and pushes over something that is soft and stinks and clatters with metal, and then he looks up. The ceiling is low, gleaming durasteel. _I shouldn’t have looked_ , Savage decides. _There is no point. There is no-one else here._ There is nothing but the wrong ceiling above him, and so he closes his eyes, quickly, and waits to fall asleep again, but it doesn’t happen. He isn’t tired.

He cannot go back just yet, can’t try and fail to remember the day he became _this_ , even though the dreams—or visions or memories or whatever they are—the dreams are where Maul is. He can barely remember where he was seconds ago, but he knows he saw Maul, and that is enough. The dreams are where pain is, hasty and deep and too hard to feel clearly, and a hand clamped over his mouth that does not let him speak. There are swirls of green magic inside his sleeping mind that terrify because they should feel like Her— _should feel like invasion, like the end of whoever Savage is and the beginning of murder_ —magic that should be the Mother’s and isn’t.

He wants to sleep. The dreams feel like home. They are the only place where Maul still is.

Maul is dead.

 _(Days or months before, Savage woke up on a Mandalorian floor, alone. He looked around for his brother, desperately, but—nothing. No Sidious, even though he’d been there and fought and they had lost. That monster had beaten Savage, and also… Maul? Savage couldn’t remember. There was no Maul. No sign of his brother. Not even a body. Then, Savage heard footsteps and hid and then he felt his way out of the palace and stole a spaceship, driven by a leftover hunger for survival he didn’t yet understand was_ useless _._

 _He was already ensconced and safe in space when he noticed he was shorter, again—that he was_ right _again—and that the prosthetic left arm dragged lower than the other. He was long gone when he thought to touch his chest and almost impaled the hand on the spike that now plugs up the wound that felt, at the time, like it should be deadly. When Savage looked at himself in a reflective window and saw what his body has become, open bloodless gouges and metal patching him up where scar tissue should be, he was already in flight._

 _He’d moved before he could think, and that’s the only way to keep moving: he was already far away when he remembered that_ there is nothing left to live for _.)_

Maul is dead everywhere that is not a dream, and Savage wants to go back. Still, it will not happen. He needs to tire himself out again before he can sleep, or make himself unconscious in other ways, and so he wipes the congealed… something from the corners of his eyes. It is not blood. He does not bleed, not the way he used to, but Savage should have expected that: ever since the Mother’s ritual, there has been no blood. When he lost his arm, there was no blood, and when Maul’s master impaled Savage on his lightsabers, there was no blood. There was only Her magic, and Maul begging him to stay alive, and then there was unconsciousness and no more Maul.

He does not bleed. He is alone on a silent spaceship, and Maul is gone. Savage could not protect his brother, and now Maul is dead— _he must be, why else would he have left Savage—_ as dead as Feral is. As dead as everyone is.

Savage looks at his hand and raises it up and smells it, and there are flecks of rotting gruel covering his fingertips. He knocked over an offering-bowl when he woke up, he remembers, knocked over Maul’s bowl. Savage trembles, and he picks up the bowl and shovels the gruel back in. The food hasn’t fully decayed yet— _will never fully decay: this is space, and there are no flies or beetles or plants to help it along_ —it isn’t gone yet, and the mourning ritual is not complete. It is a bad sign to disturb the dead’s last meal. Maul wouldn’t have cared, Savage knows, but—that does not matter. Mourning is for the living. It’s no wonder that Savage still misses his brother, he is _allowed_ to still miss his brother, because the gift for the dead has not yet been eaten.

He shouldn’t have disturbed the offering. It’s the only thing he has left of his family.

Maul is dead, and Savage cannot join him, not in a vision because he is not yet tired enough, and not in death. He only tried once, days or months ago—forever ago—on that first lonely day or night, searching the ship for a repair kit— _for someone who would_ stop _him_ —and taking a screwdriver and stabbing it deep into his flesh arm’s elbow and pulling it down towards his wrist, in a grief-blue jagged bisection of his forearm that did not stop until the screwdriver hit hand-bones and Savage lost his grip on awareness.

 _(He should not have been able to do that, he’d realized a few hours after he woke up again, with nothing but a pounding headache and the glimpse of patterned arms—of_ Maul’s _arms—hanging from durasteel cuffs that sparked with electricity. Savage should not have been able to do that. The pain should have stopped him; pain that should not weakly pool around the metal parts of Savage’s chest and the arm and, for some reason, Savage’s face. The pain should have been_ blinding _. The screwdriver tore through his muscles and nerves like they were nothing. Pain should have stopped it, and instinct, and Savage should not have been strong enough to cut through his own arm in the first place._

 _Another strange, old thing: he should have_ bled _. The arm-wound that never should have been was deep, deep enough to sever arteries, and Savage should have bled out—why else would he have cut there—but he hadn’t._

 _When he’d woken up, he looked at his flesh arm and turned it and saw the scraps of metal knitting it together. Faint leaks of green light. Cables and floor-plating and the screwdriver, too, filling up the hole he’d torn, like a metal vein inside the earth, and he had looked at it and thought:_ I should probably stop referring to that one as the ‘flesh arm.’ _)_

Savage does not bleed anymore, and he does not die.

The Mother does not want to let him go.

It must be Her doing. The light that moves the metal is green, after all, like Her magic, and She changed Savage once before. She was not there when Savage lost the fight and Maul his life, but… maybe this is nothing but the aftermath of Her first ritual. Maybe Savage has been unable to die ever since he offered himself to the Sister to protect Feral, and lost his will and body and brother for it. May this lack of death is what’s left over from that one wrong choice, that last choice before he became the Sisters’ weapon. The choice, unwittingly, that made him Her weapon.

It does not really matter. He is what he is now, and he is alone, and he cannot die.

Although— _there is probably very little the Mother can do_ , Savage decides, _if I wrench control of the navigation system and steer this stolen ship into the next sun_. He looks at his wrist again, and the cables wriggle. The Mother has reconstructed and patched his body, has replaced whatever was torn off him or cut into with durasteel parts, but there is little difference between Her actions and the new arm the Mandalorians gave to Savage. Death Watch would have been unable to attach their arm to Savage, if he’d been little but ash and charred bone splinters, or even less. The Mother’s power is greater, but…

Still, She changed his body into _this_ —She wants him to live—and She must have a reason. Savage should not presume he knows better than Her. She is power, and he’s just a nightbrother. The Mother brought back Savage’s body _(She didn’t save Maul, why didn’t—)_ and he should not thoughtlessly destroy it.

Savage raises his right arm and looks at the fingers. There must be a reason. Maybe even more than one. To keep track of them, Savage should count them out: his mind is swirling with loss, but maybe this will keep him on track. Reasons. He promises himself that he will find five, at least. Five reasons is good enough to keep him from death.

He stares at the hand.

_What are the things I know?_

Savage’s body is changed, and it will not die.

Maul is dead.

He’s not the first lost brother: Feral has been gone for a long time now, a scar that will never fully heal, and the brothers who raised Savage were chosen decades ago. They all died decades ago. Loss is not a new thing, but age does not blunt the pain. Nothing blunts it, now.

Brothers come and go; they die, and they are born. This is what makes life bearable, makes _loss_ bearable. It’s hard to die of grief when you are not alone. When you are still needed. Always there used to be someone who needed Savage, who would suffer if Savage did not care for him, and Savage could not die. He could not stop caring. There used to be a reason for life. Now, there is no-one and nothing. Maul is gone, and there is no baby in his stead that demands to be fed, no boy who needs to go to bed now regardless of the people who are never coming home. No directives clawed deep into Savage’s mind. No new bearded Master demanding service and handing out pain. No lost brother to be found and brought to the Mother. No Mother, anymore, despite Her last act. Not even She lives.

_(It had been a shock, the Mandalorian soldiers’ voices suddenly ringing through the ship’s speakers. When Savage stole the ship, it must have been patched into a minor communications line, and the system had lain dormant and then shrieked with outrage at what the voices called the Destruction of Dathomir, for a few minutes, before going silent again._

_Just that moment of horror, and then nothing but silence for days._

_Savage hasn’t touched the radio system, just in case, but it hasn’t helped. Nothing. Even when he begged the speakers, they would not talk to him, wouldn’t tell him anything else about what happened to his home. He tried finding out more about the alleged carnage, but there is only so much you can do while in hyperspace.)_

The Mother is dead. Savage would dismiss everything as a lie, if not for the simple logic that there isn’t any reason for it. Why lie about Dathomir? It is an insignificant planet, Savage had learnt when he was spat out and sent to serve Dooku. No-one cares about Dathomir but the people who live there. Why should they? Why lie? _(Why destroy it?)_ Also, no-one could have known that he was listening in. Only one conclusion is left: there is no more Mother. No Sisters. All of his brothers are dead.

Maul is not the first person that Savage lost, but he is the _last_. There is no-one else.

Bowls and opened meal-packs cover every surface that Savage is not laying on in the hold. Rotting gruel, and whatever else he could find to substitute for meat, for every corpse that Savage never got to bury. An offering for Maul, who has disappeared; another, sprinkled with durasteel shavings that will have to pass for blood now, for Feral; and more still for Viscus and Dudgeon and Resh and Stinger and Gorge and everyone else who looked on when Savage sat down on the Sister’s speeder. Everyone who lived then and who is dead now. Every brother Savage has ever known.

No-one is left alive.

He is completely alone.

Still, the Mother does not want Savage to go.

Somehow, whatever happened to Savage when he tried to protect Maul, when they faced the monster and lost, there is still a body to move. A body: the only thing left over from a long life of devotion and care. A life of failing every single brother he loved. Of watching them all die. There is nothing left of the nightbrothers and the whole planet of Dathomir now but this mangled flesh, the durasteel wriggling under its skin and the open fissures in its chest that don’t bleed and don’t heal.

Savage doesn’t particularly want it. He doesn’t really know what there is to do with these hands, now that they cannot soothe a brother. He has eyes that will never look at his family again, and a mouth that will tell no more stories.

Still: he is all that is left of the nightbrothers. He does not want to be the one that kills the last brother, either. The dead wouldn’t want him to.

Whatever Savage is now, he can still move.

He counts on the fingers of what barely still counts as his flesh hand. One: Savage has a body that does not die. Two: he has hands, hands that will never help Maul and drag him from danger when his leg is damaged, or serve food, or wake him gently from a nightmare. These hands will never cradle a baby’s head ever again— _there are no more babies_ —but they are hands nonetheless, strong hands, and all his life Savage has learnt how to fight. When his brothers taught him not to die in the trials, it was for this. When the Mother changed his body, it was for this. When Master Dooku hurt him and told him to use his pain and hate to grow strong, it was for this. _(When Maul…)_

The Mother does not want Savage to die. Her magic keeps him alive, because She wants a weapon to bathe in Her murderer’s blood, and that’s all that Savage has been, ever since Feral’s murder: a weapon for the Sister to wield, and for Master Dooku. A weapon for Mother Talzin. _Not a weapon for Maul,_ Savage thinks quietly _, in those months, but—Maul is dead now._ It does not matter what Savage was with Maul. He is a weapon now.

Fingers crunch into fists. Savage knows who did this to him. To Dathomir. To the nightbrothers. To Maul.

The Mother raised a weapon for Her revenge, and She will have it.

Sidious will _burn_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When you're alone for weeks it's very easy to think yourself into really bad ideas.....
> 
> Thanks for reading <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Death Watch continue their campaign of helping their leader overcome his losses, and Maul is mostly unimpressed.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Mild body horror, mention of suicidal ideation, mention of slavery and genocide.

“That is not my brother,” Maul growls. Immediately, he wishes he could take back his words. They ring out childish and hopeful and petulant into the busy main landing bay of the battle freighter that currently serves as the much-reduced Shadow Collective’s mobile headquarters, and the apprentice would not have so pathetically lost his composure. He’d never have dared.

The apprentice is long mutilated and buried. It’s a sore mistake, still, but weakness is no longer deadly: it’s only Kast and Saxon and a gaggle of other people Maul doesn’t care about listening. None of them will use the admission to hurt him. It is fairly unlikely, at any rate. They are not Lord Sidious. The Master is parsecs away.

Still—despite the clarity wrought by loss and recovery and week-long meditation, it’s a reaction that shall forever be ingrained in Maul’s being. Nothing but shame for speaking. For openness. For that battered, helplessly jubilant feeling that accompanied his rousing in the middle of the night. For the anticipation stalking him like a killer while he was led from the room he had barely left in the weeks after his mother’s death. _Hope is a foolish pursuit._ He should not have expected to see Savage. He shouldn’t have shivered at the mere idea of seeing him again impossibly alive, and neither should he have hoped to kneel by his half-rotted corpse, recovered at last.

Burial is vanity. A cadaver is unnecessary, even as confirmation that his brother is dead. Lord Sidious killed him. That death is why He came to Mandalore, and He never fails. Maul is only alive because he is miles beneath his Master’s notice. Savage is dead, despite Maul’s desperate attempts to keep him he _can’t_ have survived—and yet, pathetically, hope isn’t. Seeing death-spots and rot and maggots would have put an end to these false dreams of primitive aching green magic and metal patching and _Where are you, Maul, please tell me_ , over and over, the dreams that come near every night and that he is too weak to want gone.

The corpse would have dissolved the phantom hands that soothe his stress-knotted back at night, and the durasteel writhing in his chest by day.

 _(Maul had long been awake when Gar Saxon came rushing into his room. He’d been awake for days it seemed, feeling the metal that isn’t there move inside him and knit close a wound no-one had inflicted. More still: he’d been caught in a queer churn of despair that now, he cannot explain to himself._ All of my brothers are dead _, and it had torn his hearts, but Maul only ever had one brother to lose._ I am alone. Utterly alone, and She remade me and I cannot die _, he had felt and watched himself feel,_ Please, let me die, _uncentered and helpless and suspicious. Nothing made sense. His mind was not his. It couldn’t be: how strange, to mourn survival. Life was worth every pain. He didn't remember the first days on Lotho Minor, didn't remember how it was to grow mad from abandonment and suffering, but maybe it had been like this. Maybe it was starting again._

 _Saxon’s arrival had been relief, pointless emotions and terror interrupted for what he’d expected was more soup, and then the man had bid Maul come to the hangar. “’Alor, we found your family,” he’d said. He’d_ promised _.)_

Maul should have known all along that Death Watch cannot work wonders. Their unexpected loyalty has done much, has delivered him from captivity and boredom and forced nutrients down his throat, but it cannot weigh up the cruelties of Lord Sidious. He should have expected something, anything, else. Try as he might, though—he’d never have imagined _this_.

A small fleet of five Kom'rk-class fighters has set down in the landing bay, and armored commandos are in the process of hauling out the cargo. Living cargo. Resistant cargo—unwilling, terrified, traumatized.

They’ve brought zabraks.

The man currently being presented to Maul was the first to disembark. Or, be disembarked, rather, for he can’t even stand properly, clinging on despite physical abuse and malnutrition with an air of stubborn anger that’s deeply familiar. He’s young, colored in bruised orange and dark brown, his horn pattern unrecognizable beneath the swaddle of bandages and bacta patches likely applied mid-flight. The second he looks up, his eyes lock onto Maul’s: not challenge but… belief. Salvation.

“Gladiator slave from Nar Shadaa,” the Mando keeping him upright—Ja Goos or somesuch, Maul remembers—says helpfully. “Poor sod. Good fighter. We haven’t worked up to names yet, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem with you here, ‘Alor.” A beat. “Sir.”

“What is the _purpose_ of this display.” Maul’s eyes slide from the anonymous zabrak to the chipper helpmeet while he growls, but it’s Gar Saxon who answers him. This was not just the brain-wind scheme of a starstruck teenager, then. The madness is rooted at the very top.

“A people is not dead if her children still sing,” Saxon says.

“Why would you—”

“These are the remnants of your people, Lord Maul,” Kast interjects. “Some of them, at least. This is just the first of fifty of our search crews. Dathomir is razed and dead, but cautious exploration found emptied landing spots dotting the planet. Some must have escaped annihilation. In response, we have scoured the outer rim for you, and it turns out there are nightbrothers still spread around the galaxy, as bed-warmers and fighters and cooks. Some are even free. What that old monster did—the carnage he wrought against your home was brutal and devastating, but not total. No genocide ever is. Even now, you are not alone.”

Her eyes are rancid with sympathy. Mercifully, she does not attempt to touch him.

The expectant pause left by her words, Maul refuses to fill; instead he watches as another zabrak joins the gladiator. This one has three-day stubble atop his head and finger-thick gaps in his deep red coloring, as if he’d struggled desperately against the tattooing needles. Under Maul’s questioning gaze, he cringes.

The soldier he’s clinging to just shrugs in answer to a raised eyebrow. _Yes, obviously he’s Iridonian,_ the posture says. _What did you expect me to do? Leave him?_

When the ships are finally emptied and the passengers assembled for Maul’s silent inspection, it turns out only half of the twenty-strong group are even vaguely zabrakian. Two wookiees, a quarren, and several twi’leks are among the spoils of the Mandalorians’ quick raid on the hutt-controlled casino planet of Nar Shadaa. None of them dare raise their eyes off the floor, but after a minute, the stolen slaves seek each other out, cling to each other’s arms and share the blankets and teas brought to them, and this must be why Death Watch’s search crew took them indiscriminately. No time to pry apart their desperate little bonds. No reason. A yellow nightbrother, barely teenaged, carries a nautolan toddler atop his shoulders, and Maul quashes the rend in his hearts.

“I was born in exile,” Rook Kast continues then, apparently having given up on waiting for Maul’s reaction, favorable or otherwise, and it rings loud into the vast too-quiet space. She commands her audience: a few slaves even look at her. “When the New Mandalorians seized power, they tried to wipe us out. Wipe out our culture. They chased my pregnant mother from her home because she would not betray the old ways. She would not bow to the smug values of the pacifists, and so she ran, and she found community again on a colony-moon. I was born there. I was raised by old warriors and new exiles. I fashioned my own beskar and I knew all the old tales. I knew Mandalore would rise again. The first-born new hope, they used to say. The first, but many followed.”

Saxon’s deep, sonorous voice adds, “A people is not dead if her children still sing.”

It explains the _why_ of the mission at least, Maul decides. Explains their loyalty, too, when the chained victim or the mourner kneeling in his room had little in common with the Sith who’d challenged Pre Viszla for the command of Death Watch. When they look at the scorched earth of Dathomir, Kast and Saxon see their own past, and parallels are seductive. Maul couldn’t have ensnared them more if he’d tried: this would have been a ploy worthy of his Master, for all it’s been entirely a misunderstanding.

So they sought more nightbrothers because they themselves found solace in community. Theirs is belief born from experience, evidently, and Death Watch’s expectations are admittedly not fully irrational. Maul had met them accompanied by another of his species, after all.

However: biology, that’s all that connects Maul to this consolation prize. Familiar hues, and if he focuses on the ships behind the slaves he might even take some of the blurred forms in the edge of his vision for the one person he wants to see, but even if they were wholly visually indistinguishable—they are not Savage. They are not Maul’s family. They are just zabraks.

He hadn’t thought much of Savage when they first met, either. An intruder. A big man who’d enticed a scuttling creature from out its cave, offering the only thing that mattered on a scarce trash-filled planet: food. Medicine, later, and a safe place to sleep, he’d insisted, but Maul hadn’t yet been filled with trust. He hadn’t slept. He’d howled to be let out again, long after lift-off, because even though Lotho Minor was cruel, it was familiar. He’d wanted to go back, to the one hell he knew he could survive.

It had taken time, mostly, that and Savage’s steady gentle patience.

Maul had learnt—too late, far too late, not until a stark palace floor and twin impaled hearts, but he’d finally learnt to call him _brother_.

Time, that’s what Kast and Saxon hope to give him now. Time with these strangers, but… Maul had been younger then, on Lotho Minor. He’d known loss—had been familiar with it ever since early childhood, droids coming and caring and dismembered; but though it had crushed, it had never been of this magnitude. He yet hadn’t watched the only person who ever loved him die. He hadn’t failed to save his family. He’d had no experience with other zabraks.

He didn’t see a dead, beloved face when he looked at Savage.

Savage did. _(Kneeling before Maul many weeks into their acquaintance, he’d confessed, empty eyes averted and with a halting low voice, what he’d been forced to do. His enslavement, the danger the nightsisters posed, Feral’s murder, he’d laid out everything. Maul had forgiven him for it, though it was not his place. He hadn’t… cared, or known he cared, yet, about his desperate brother, but he’d sensed the opportunity: to bind this apprentice close. To give what no-one else would. Talzin had forced Savage to kill Feral to prove his subjection, to shackle him to herself, but in doing so, she’d given him to Maul instead._

 _Savage had been weak—he had been_ strong _enough—to lose a brother and seek out the next one.)_  Savage would have withered, left completely alone. He would have embraced these slaves.

But Maul is not his brother. He eyes the gladiator, and then he turns. _Savage is dead_. The thought of looking at his distorted lost face on a stranger, for any longer than necessary, is repugnant. “These are not my people,” he growls.

“Lord Maul—”

“Brother, please—”

“Bring them to Zanbar camp. It’s fully operational and inhabited, still, isn’t it? Do not separate them. Food, stability, safety. That’s what they need. Ignore their behavioral problems, and forgive them,” Maul orders. “Stay close-by. In time, they will trust you. Now, get them out of my sight.”

It’s advice that he’ll repeat impatiently, for the next search crew and the one that follows and the twelve thereafter. He doesn’t have the heart to call them off their mission. He’ll repeat it, until the soldiers bring in, snarling and shackled and with a gun to her head, and insisting that she came by her own free will to bring news that Maul urgently needs to hear—one of Savage’s tormentors. The woman he'd initially sacrificed himself to.

The handcuffs fall to the floor, incapable of holding a force user.

“Hello, Maul,” Asajj Ventress says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finished plotting, but let's see whether everything goes as planned. Despite the angst this story does have a happy ending, which is why I updated the unduly grim summary. Next chapter we'll check in with Asajj's POV, and then Obi-Wan. Never wrote either of their POVs before so much to learn I have.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which conclusions are drawn. Some of them are even accurate.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Same old body horror. Made-up force shenanigans. Accidental self-harm. Grief. Dehumanization.

This Darth Maul is a far cry from the angry stalking beast of Raydonia. He’s quiet, for starters. He’s lost his shadow. He looks much older, too; the man standing before her in the busy landing bay of the massive Mandalorian cruiser has aged far beyond the mere months it’s been since they last saw each other, when Asajj saved Obi-Wan Kenobi from two raving monsters.

He’s not gaunt, but close. Ribs peek out shamelessly from his open tunic. Like all nightbrothers that Asajj has ever seen apart from fucking Savage Opress after his faulty upgrade, Maul’s never been much more than lean muscle, though she always attributed that to his exile, and for the others, to the scarce harsh landscape of Dathomir. To the tributes they paid to her clan, instead of eating. Perhaps the males were just bred for thinness, though.

After all, Maul apparently now commands Mandalore, or the terrorist army occupying it, depending on who’s asked. By all rights, he should have put on weight instead of losing what little he had. He owns luxuries, now.

He should look better.

That he doesn’t fills Asajj with quiet satisfaction. It strengthens her hopes: she did not want to come, but apparently, she was right.

A wreck. That’s what he is now. A sickly green tinge to his red face, and he’s barely more than spat-out garbage, even though Sidious apparently still couldn’t kill him. He’s slouched and finely trembling and stubbornly upright, a purple-armored Mando close by his side, arms ready to catch him should he fall. Not a warlord, but a has-been tolerated for his former glories—if there were any—and Asajj tucks the fault line close. It may prove useful. He must be weak indeed to tolerate this display.

If it wasn’t for his black markings, there would be deep sleepless bruises visible under his eyes, because surely, his recent nights have been just as restless as Asajj’s. He’s probably got the pounding headache, too. The alien revulsions. The hallucinations. The second-hand death wish.

Savage Opress is Maul’s apprentice, like he is Asajj’s mate.

They’re in the same boat now.

No, not boat. They’re tied to the same karking _boulder_. The same force bond, driving them both slowly insane. If anyone else has been subjected to the strange, constant psychic assault of nonexistent things wriggling under her skin that she finally managed to trace to that as yet unbroken mental connection, it’s Maul.

Despite all this, he is also saner, more controlled, than she has ever seen him. Open hatred in his eyes and a hand tapping nervously against the hilt of the lightsaber dangling from his belt, but apart from that, he is still. Silent. Waiting. Empty. Glowing—

_Green._

The longing hits Asajj so strongly it almost bowls her over. Green, and she recognizes it now: faint green traces on Maul, like her Sisters’ magicks. Light, slowly leaking out.

He looks utterly _miserable_.

Asajj doesn’t pity him. Wouldn’t even be tempted. Maul brought this pain down on himself, and on all their heads. He let Savage loose. He… Asajj bares her teeth, and the pathetic handcuffs fall. She reins herself in. He is bathed in their magicks now, but he _killed them_. Maul brought Sidious to Dathomir. Every day still, unforgotten—unforgettable screams ring through Asajj’s mind, the last desperate pleas of the Nightsister witches before their annihilation, of Asajj’s _family_ , and that’s not even the worst problem. It’s not what brings her here. She could have coped, if it was just death-screams. Asajj mourns her people. That makes sense. The other thoughts, though…

_(There would be no sleep tonight, Asajj decided when the last Sister’s cry had hushed. She knew how it went. She had been abandoned by Hal’Sted—and good fucking riddance—by Master Narec, by Dooku, and now her clan was gone too. It would be unwise to sleep. Instead, she threw knives at the wall and collected them and threw them again in moving meditation, until all was still inside and action automatic. She sank into the force._

_Then, after uncounted hours, faces came to her. Not her family’s. Instead, patterned horned faces she did not care about. Maul, laughing and whispering instructions and begging her desperately to stay alive; other nightbrothers; and over and over, a small orange-skinned maleling that was vaguely familiar. They were faces she didn’t care for, or ones she hated—this was all Maul’s fault, something awake and outside knew—but she mourned them. Each face was the loss of an entire life, a world that could have been. She cried._ I am alone now, _she thought._ All of my brothers are dead _._

Let me die, Mother.

_When Asajj realized her mind had been hijacked and fought her way back to the surface, she had already cut through her vambrace and deep into her arm.)_

The other thoughts are foreign thoughts. They’re not her, for all they take control as soon as her attention lapses. They’re intrusions. Hallucinations. Concerns she’s never had, or not for a very long time. Asajj has been alone, abandoned, for most her life. She’s dealt with the pain. She’s beaten it long ago. She has emerged, powerful and vicious and the master of her own destiny.

Still, the other thoughts are impossible to get rid of, relentless despite and because of their absurdity— _She remade me and I cannot die—_ and they had mystified Asajj, terrified her, until she’d finally remembered after the first sleepless week: the living force is a web connecting all beings, and there are still two reinforced bonds tethering her to the living. Two chains to drag her down.

One, to her former Master, the man who betrayed her and who she failed to kill. This one’s dormant, for everyone’s convenience.

The other: to her slave.

Apparently, Savage Opress is trying to murder her _again_.

 _(Their connection had originally been mostly a formality._ This is what happens when you win a maleling, _her Sisters had explained._ He belongs to you now. His thoughts belong to you. _Asajj had cared much more about results than about the arcane theories of her people then, for all the plan turned out a failure. She’d been naïve. She hadn’t asked whether it could be used against her. She hadn’t asked whether it could be broken. The connection had been nothing but a minor nuisance her Sisters should have warned her of, though of course, none of the others ever had to suffer. Nightbrothers die long before their leaky thoughts get too repetitive. Slowly, she had grown used to it, and then Savage had tried to kill her and met Maul and finally learned how to shield his mind._

_And that would be the end of the whole affair, Asajj had hoped._

_Fat chance.)_

Dathomir burned, and less than a day after, the force bond flared back to life. Something happened to make Savage Opress stop caring about the boundaries of his mind, and now, Asajj is being boiled alive slowly. A pounding headache of despair day-in, day-out. Drowning in a sea of love and mourning for Maul— _for a man who she can’t even imagine anyone genuinely_ liking _, and who, besides, is clearly unfortunately still alive_ —and suffering endless secondhand tortures. Needles, maggots, cables, forever writhing.

Asajj wants her own skin back. She wants to sleep again.

She wants Savage Opress to _shut up_.

She’ll do whatever it takes.

She just needs to find him first, and that’s why she’s here. He vanished without a trace, one-and-a-half months ago, a short while before Dathomir’s end. Asajj had loosely been following the trail of the monster she’d lost control of and unleashed, paying contacts for tales of Maul and his massive, quiet, ever-present shadow meandering around the galaxy and slaughtering pirates and mafia and peaceful Mandos alike. Then, suddenly: nothing. Not for any price. Maul left Mandalore, alone, and dis- and reappeared. No sign of Opress. A falling-out? A fight?

Whatever it was, Savage can’t be dead, or he wouldn’t be bothering Asajj. Whatever it is, none of the information brokers Asajj has ever heard of know anything at all.

There’s nowhere to go but the one source left, now. The fellow drowner. She’ll just have to hold back the hatred for the man who got her people killed.

“Hello, Maul,” Asajj greets, with supreme dignity.

Then, she waits. There’s no acknowledgement.

“I did not come here to fight.”

Maul stares.

“I have come to exchange information.”

Nothing.

The bustling all around them continues. Mandos waving around the blasters they drew when Asajj unlocked her cuffs. Mandos dragging their slave cargo out of the ship’s hold, whispering quietly. More Mandos, pouring into the landing bay. More threat displays, but Maul himself doesn’t even blink.

Finally, the purple-armored soldier at Maul’s side steps forward and says, “You did not ‘come here’ at all. You were brought.”

There’s nothing to be gained from underestimation, right now, and so Asajj raises her uncuffed hands and explains, “Do you really think you could have made me do anything I didn’t want to? It would’ve been easy to find you. I’m a bounty hunter. But why bother when there was a Mandalorian taxi ready to take me straight where I wanted to go? I did not come here to fight, Maul. I came to talk. I have a proposal for you.”

“No,” Maul says. Well. It’s better than mulish, stubborn silence, at least. Barely.

“It’s mutually beneficial, I assure you.”

“No.”

“It’s about something you lost.”

“No.”

Asajj is tired. She has a headache. She doesn’t particularly want to be here in the first place, and there are phantom worms multiplying and digging through her ribcage— _Maul’s hand twitches towards his chest, another piece of evidence_ —and she has no patience for whatever game Maul thinks he’s playing. She hisses, “Where is your brother, Maul?”

He stills again. So does the whole bay, this time, except for the purple Mando who lightly touches Maul’s shoulder. Then, blasters cock.

“I’m asking about Savage Opress, in case that wasn’t clear.”

“Dead,” Maul says flatly.

“Don’t insult me. You know I’m not that stupid.”

No air, suddenly. Fingers pressing into her throat. Dirty, scraping nails. Asajj curses herself for her mistake, for the split-second in which she failed to defend herself. Maul was just meters away, and she forgot. She’s been lulled in by his wretched demeanor, by his petulant silence, by his pretense at calm, and she’s forgotten: beneath it all lurks a beast, ready to lunge.

Maul’s eyes are close-by now as he tries to wring her neck, too close and far too wide, and there’s no intelligence left in them. Nothing but pain.

Still—she couldn’t have skewered him on her sabers, anyway, no matter how desperately she wants to. She came here to talk. He’s the only person left who knows anything. Even though, apparently, if he’s not lying—he’s too ignorant to even _realize_ there’s anything to know.

“I wouldn’t do—do that, if I were you,” Asajj rasps out.

More pressure.

“Don’t. You’ll regret… I know. He’s not dead.”

Maul’s voice isn’t particularly pleasant, howled straight into her ear. “I watched him _die_ ,” he shrieks, loud and hoarse and spittle-flecked. “I held him. He fought—I tried to—I let go. I let him die. My Master _killed_ him. He killed my brother. He took everything. Savage is _dead_.”

Still: his hands ease off slightly. He wants to believe her.

Asajj gulps in air.

“He’s not,” she says, once she’s recovered. “And you know it. You should, anyway. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Nightmares about him, over and over. Every night. The kind of things he’d be thinking. You, mostly. Other dead nightbrothers. Not much variety in his mind. It feels like it’s you, thinking it. It feels like it’s real, but then you realize…”

Maul nods. A jerky, unselfconscious movement.

“Weird tortures. Like something’s inside you, trying to get out.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a rogue force bond.”

He looks stunned. Desperate. Eager.

“It’s stronger than it used to be, than it should be, but yes, that’s what it is,” Asajj explains, as if to a stupid child. “I won him, a long time ago, and Mother Talzin’s ritual... We’re connected. He’s your Sith apprentice, and you—he’s _awful_ at shielding. That’s what he’s feeling, right now. Those fucking worms. The torture. That’s him. He’s inflicting his misery on us. He wouldn’t be feeling anything, if he was dead. In conclusion: he’s alive, and we need to find him.”

 _We need to put him out of his misery_ is something she’ll hold back for now. She has no desire to get attacked again.

Maul isn’t listening anymore, anyway. His eyes are saucer-wide, stuffed to the brim with epiphany and bottomless horror. He lets go of Asajj’s neck, finally, and staggers backwards. He stumbles. He falls. He doesn’t get up.

“ _Master_ ,” he whispers. “My brother—Lord Sidious took him as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was difficult to write, mostly because I'm not quite used yet to Asajj's POV. This chapter was originally twice as long, but it works better with this break. Hence, the new chapter count.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Asajj is subjected to yet another unpleasant conversation.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Nothing, really.

Death Watch must be utterly indifferent by now to their leader’s antics, or resigned to them a least. Maul’s breakdown is effortlessly ignored. Everybody must have overheard the conversation. They must have witnessed their apparent commander choke a visitor and then huddle on the floor, mindless and gibbering and terrified of a Sith Lord who isn’t here, but it looks like the Mandos are adept at pretending they haven’t, and the helmets definitely help. There are no accident gawkers, or at least none to be noticed. Instead, quickly, the busy pace inside the cargo hold picks up again.

The Mandos return to their tasks, ignoring Asajj’s presence and occasionally veering off their straight paths to keep a wide circle around Maul clear and empty. At least most of them do: there’s a protective honor guard next to him, still.

The purple-armored soldier is one of them, of course. The other—as short as Maul, but easily twice as wide—wears beskar painted yellow and adorned with spikes.

“Update all rescue teams. Comm Gar. You heard Lord Maul: our brother is not dead. He is in the hands of the enemy. Command meeting, sixteen hours sharp,” the purple Mando shouts, and immediately, the hold empties.

Then, the helmet’s visor turns in Asajj’s direction, and back to Maul. Squatting down next to him, though far enough that his arms can’t reach— _that won’t help at all when he loses it again_ , Asajj thinks—the purple Mando says something in a language Asajj doesn’t understand, and Maul replies in kind, incredibly slowly, stumbling over a syllable or two and with a pronunciation completely unlike the practiced tones of his counterpart, but obviously determined. Asajj’s name comes up, once or twice.

Maul never before seemed the type to openly, _intentionally_ display his shortcomings, not to enemies and especially not to his allies. The breakdown was unavoidable, perhaps— _Asajj would rage at the deaths of her family too, if she had a little less self-control_ —but he’s regained use of his faculties now. This is a deliberate choice.

 _Only one reason why he’d be speaking, or trying to speak, Mando’a now:_ _this is something they don’t want me to know_. It puts up Asajj’s hackles, a kind of vulnerability in ignorance that might well be another motivation, if, after meeting him today, she still was to credit him with the intelligence needed to play these kinds of mind-games. Maybe this _is_ a shade of what he used to be like. It’s easy to forget, seeing him, but he was raised a Sith. He is like her; not like Savage Opress plucked from the fields and magicked, but trained, like Asajj herself and like her former Master Darth Tyranus. She should not keep underestimating this nightbrother.

Regardless: they’ve reached a truce. An alliance, if not in so many words. Maul hasn’t even questioned her properly yet, but at least he knows he knows nothing. He cannot get what he wants without her aid. Whatever these machinations… for the moment, she is as safe as anyone could be, in his company.

Maul heaves himself up onto his knees. His feet, just as unsteadily. He doesn’t favor her with another glance when he leaves, and then Asajj is alone with his guard.

“Follow me, Asajj Ventress,” the purple Mando says. “To your room.”

“You have me at a disadvantage. Your name?”

A beat. Then, the soldier removes her helmet and joggles her chin-length dark hair, not completely unlike a wet finkwolf. “Rook Kast. This is Jagrub.” Pointing over her shoulder with her thumb, Rook Kast, life-long fanatic criminal and the Face of the Terror of Mandalore according to at least five people Asajj has met, indicates the massive gamorrean sow behind her. Jagrub’s also taken off her spiked helmet.

“You brought your bodyguard?” Asajj smirks, which then occurs to her was a tad unwise, perhaps, even if it makes her feel better, but: truce. Maul needs her. A guard detail is as befitting the woman’s obvious status anyway, really. Terror of Mandalore indeed, and in the short time since her arrival, Asajj has seen Kast’s closeness to Maul. Second in command, maybe, or even more. Caretaker. The power behind the throne. It’s not like a feral nightbrother has much experience in leading an army.

Still. A bodyguard. It would be flattering, if it wasn’t so insulting. Another forceblind won’t make even the ghost of a difference to her chances of survival, should Asajj choose to leave.

Kast’s face is effortlessly still. “She’s not here to protect me.”

 _Whatever_.

Politeness is a scarce resource on Mandalore, evidently: Kast and Jagrub take off without another word, straight through a crowd of Mandos that respectfully divides at their approach, expecting Asajj to follow them. It’s left to the guest to attempt small talk. “I wouldn’t have expected anyone to order _you_ to show a visitor around, Rook Kast.” Forward, again, but it’s not like she even attempts to hide her authority, and Asajj is curious. “It’s usually less of a general’s duty. I’m sure you have a busy schedule.”

“I volunteered,” Kast says, and then she smiles at Asajj so widely the light glints off her teeth. It does not reach her eyes.

It shuts off conversation until they reach Asajj’s designated quarters, visually indistinguishable from any of the other rooms she’s glanced at through oddly luxurious stained-glass windows or open doors. A quartet of bunk-beds, and a table. Asajj inspects the door-handle—there is a code-lock, too, but neither of her companions offer to set it and Asajj doesn’t ask—and then she strides in. Kast and Jagrub follow. The door slides shut.

“What did you want to talk to me about in private?” Asajj asks eventually, after a few seconds, when she has tired of being stared at. No response. Apparently, Maul’s found the one cache of people in the galaxy who share his awful habits.

Time for a gambit. Testing the fault line. The limits of Maul’s authority. Surreptitiously, Asajj touches her ‘sabers. It’s not like there is any real risk here—Asajj might piss off Kast, but general or not, the woman’s still only a forceblind soldier. If Asajj is wrong about Kast’s purposes, then this conversation will definitely find its way to Maul’s ears, but even that is only a minor concern. Maul hates her, anyway. He’s tried to wring her neck for long enough to prove it. He won’t breach their truce, though, not if he wants to see his brother again. The brother who is in Sidious’ hands now, apparently. He’ll need all the help he can get, and he’ll prioritize Savage’s recovery. Here goes nothing.

“Something you don’t want Maul to hear, perhaps?”

“Of a sort.”

“It is fairly obvious that he’s not particularly stable—”

“I am curious,” Kast interrupts. “I am Mandalorian, Asajj Ventress. My old enemies, too, are Mandalorian, and they possess honor. I have never before met someone who so utterly devalues family.”

Asajj snarls. She doesn’t care what this this smug soldier thinks of her, this Death Watch terrorist fighting for the restoration of barbaric total and constant war—many of Asajj's sources in the attempt to track Opress were recent refugees from Sundari’s old regime—and moreover: Kast allied herself with _Maul_. With the man who drew Mother Talzin into his conflict with Sidious. With the man that got her killed. The man who destroyed the entirety of her clan and the only people Asajj hadn’t yet lost. The man who _took her Sisters_.

And now she dares lecture Asajj about family?

“Fuck off. You know nothing about me. You know nothing of what I have lost.”

“Interesting.” Kast’s face blanks, and then, obviously deliberately, she grins. By the second, it’s more obvious why she didn’t hesitate for a second to take off her helmet: with her studied off-kilter body language, it’s like she’s wearing another mask below. “True, perhaps. I don’t particularly care either way.”

“Then what—”

“However—I do know _of_ you, Asajj Ventress. As soon as I heard your name, I remembered you.” Kast shrugs, settling her shoulders, and then without warning she changes tack: “Has anybody ever… begged you to kill them?”

Asajj shifts, moving her back surreptitiously closer to the wall and her arms akimbo: her hands, once more, above her lightsabers. She won’t be caught unawares again. For all the tone of that question is closer to idle conversation than Kast’s previous terse statements, for all her face is still wearing a smile, for all the turn in conversation that’s brought them here is opaque, since anyone this readily turning a simple objection into a standoff should not survive to become a general… _this is a death threat_.

The bodyguard takes in Asajj’s readiness for battle, even if Kast doesn’t. Takes in their meagre chances of survival against a trained force user, too. She puts a placatory hand on her superior’s shoulder.

Kast doesn’t shrug it off. She leans into the touch eagerly, fingering Jagrub’s massive shoulder-spikes with a trembling hand and intense concentration, and then she adds, “It’s an interesting experience. Not particularly pleasant. I have killed scores of enemies, and yet… I would not even have made the Duchess or her pacifists beg, I think. Now that I know, anyway. Didn’t really know what I was getting into. I don’t know what I expected, when I decided to find out what kind of person my new Mand’alor was after we retook Sundari.”

“Maul wouldn’t _beg_ for death.” He’s miserable, and Asajj has watched him howl vengeance at Kenobi deep in the throes of madness, but he wouldn’t ask to die. That’s not like him. She doesn’t know him that well—and does not particularly want to learn more—but this, she knows.

“Lord Maul wouldn’t,” Kast readily agrees. “But then he’s the last person I’d pick for plying with alcohol until he’s too drunk to stay tight-lipped, too. A lost cause from the start. No chance of getting anything out of the poor paranoid bastard. He doesn’t even drink. He says he _likes water_.”

The worms inside Asajj’s ribcage writhe again. She kind of knows where this is going.

“Fortunately, he had a brother. As you know. Has, and we’ll find him. Much more approachable, and so I invited him along to our victory party. Well, Gar and Kaat did. He was terrified of me. Very flattering, until I figured out why anyway. Nothing like the rest of you arrogant force-users, so I was already predisposed to liking him, and when he asked us for a favor, I foolishly said yes.”

So: _Savage Opress wants to die_. That’s not even news. He’s been shouting it in her mind for weeks now, and if the sleepwalking cuts on her arm are anything to go by, he’s got in a respectable try already.

His conversation with Kast must have been weeks before he was abducted by Sidious, though. It must be about more than the torture, then.

It…

“I’d have said yes anyway, even with hindsight. He was easy to pity. He wouldn’t stop crying after a few beers, when he told me—you already know what he told me, Asajj Ventress. You _forced_ him, after all.”

“I—” Asajj starts, but whatever she might have replied is simply steamrollered. This is not a conversation, after all. This is a death threat.

“He gave me options. Weaknesses in his fighting style he’d noticed or learned from Maul. General weaknesses of force-users, too. He gave me a long list of body parts to blast and tried to give me his lightsaber, too, so I would have an easy time of killing him, if—when, he said, when he was used again to hurt his little brother.”

Jagrub runs a claw through Kast’s hair in a slow swirl, messily sticking it up, and she calms again.

“I know what you did, Nightsister. I promised Savage I would protect Maul, and I will. I gave my word. Mandalore gave hers, too, when she embraced her new-found sons, and we keep our promises. You said you’d let Feral live and you betrayed him, but when you break your next oath—” Kast cocks her fingers as a blaster and aims. Fires. She blows smoke off it— “when you touch him again or anyone at all, I swear on my home: one single twitch, and it will be my _pleasure_ to deal the consequences.”

“We all look forward to the dissolution of this alliance,” Jagrub rumbles. “For now, you are useful. Do not attempt to escape.”

They leave the door open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick update because I keep rewriting everything I haven't posted, and I have so much other stuff I want to write. This used to be part 2 of the last chapter, so it was mostly done. Maul's been speculating in CH4 about why Death Watch are loyal to him now that he's obviously weak and beaten, but he isn't particularly good at guessing. I don't know why I decided that Kast likes making speeches at people instead of having conversations. She's trying very hard not to snap, though, so she has no concentration left for listening.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
